Xbox 360 up 200% in Japan, Wii down 60%

Almost every video games hardware is down year-on-year in Japan, that is apart from the Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360's Japan sales are now up 197.2% in 2009 over the same period last year. That's a big jump, which either shows the poor performance of the console before now, or the great strides the console has made with the release of titles such as Star Ocean 4.

The Xbox 360 is now in touching distance of the one million milestone in Japan (double the lifetime achievement of the original Xbox), which to put in some context, took Microsoft's console over 150 weeks longer than the GameCube.

The rest of the console board is down in 2009, showing that Japan's consumers have really been hit by the economic recession. This is one factor that led to the UK overtaking the region as the second largest video game buyer. Year-on-year total hardware sales are down 30.7%.

The PlayStation 3 is down 11.6%, but the Nintendo Wii has fallen a sorry 62.1% over 2008. The poor performance of Nintendo's home console can best be seen in last week's hardware chart.

In fact, Nintendo's drop in sales has resulted in the Wii and PlayStation 3 reaching a dead-heat in the region, at 216,461 and 211,182 units respectively. The Xbox 360 is currently at a respectable 106,167 units.

Still, even at this current rate it would take the PlayStation 3 another four years to catch up to the Wii's total Japanese install base. Furthermore, the PlayStation 3's current 121 week total is equal to the total achieved by the PlayStation 2 at 36 weeks. Now that really puts things into perspective. Nevertheless, releases like Yakuza 3 and Resident Evil 5 are starting to buck the trend.

Source: MediaCreate via NeoGAF's JoshuaJSlone